Collins, Jane (2012) Embodied Presence and Dislocated Spaces: Playing the Audience in Ten Thousand Several Doors in a Promenade, Site-specific Performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In: Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Performance Interventions . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., pp. 54-68. ISBN 9780230364066
|Type of Research:||Book Section|
This chapter develops a conference paper presented to the Scenography Working Group at the International Federation of Theatre Research Annual Conference, ‘Cultures of Modernity’ in Munich in July 2010, the paper is now published in an edited collection which seeks to interrogate current trends, practices, and implications of performance in which site/location/landscape is central. The publication in which the paper appears covers analyses of ‘site’ at its most local, specific, and actual. It addresses site-specificity in the realm of the global and globalisation, and situates site-specificity beyond the ‘purely’ spatial in order to examine what new/different discourses appear to emerge.
Within the frame-work of expanding notions of site-specific performance this chapter uses Ten Thousand Several Doors, a production I directed in 2006 and re-staged in 2009, as case study to investigate the potential of site based work to produce new readings of classic texts. Contemporary theories of performance and spectorship are used to analyse the production and reception of the work. I argue that the spatial properties of the site and the embodied presence of the audience as an element of the scenography, afforded the actors opportunites for ‘play’ that embroiled the audience in the moral ambiguities of Webster’s text, in ways that more coventional staging would not have permitted.
Publisher's description of the volume in which this chapter appears:
|Additional Information (Publicly available):||
Reviewed: 'This excellent anthology provides a wide-ranging collection of essays on critical issues of place-based theatre. It includes articles that treat historical and contemporary themes from the perspectives of both theorists and practitioners in a variety of institutional contexts. As the best anthologies do, it both bolsters and challenges the discipline.' - Professor Laurie Beth Clark, University of Wisconsin Madison, USA
|Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed:||Performance, scenography, site specific, Duchess of Malfi, John Webster, Jacobean tragedy|
|Your affiliations with UAL:||Colleges > Wimbledon College of Arts|
|Date:||26 October 2012|
|Date Deposited:||17 Sep 2012 14:59|
|Last Modified:||20 Feb 2014 12:28|
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